sizable demographic who sees all this as abhorrent as the rest of us.

Last time I searched it polls in israel had 10% opposed in any way to what the current govt is doing

There are people who speak up, but it’s definitely not a sizeable demographic. Even before the genocide started, Israelis who protested Israel’s human rights abuses and wars faced a heckton of suppression. A friend of a friend was hospitalised after being severely beaten by right wing counter protesters at an anti-genocide demonstration. Far from taking action to stop it, the police (as they were watching it happen) laughed at her and said she deserved it.

Children are taught from a young age of the necessity of Zionism, and that they are fundamentally superior to Palestinians and other Arabs, who are inherently violent and dangerous. They twist the knife of the generational trauma of the holocaust, because scared and hurt people are easier to manipulate to hate.

Compulsory military service in the IDF is another powerful tool used to shape Israeli’s opinions; There’s been a lot of research on how the military has a shockingly strong effectiveness at shifting the views of those who serve in it, leading to galvanisation of an us-vs-them way of thinking. People who refuse compulsory service are routinely imprisoned, sometimes for longer than their term of service would be.

Press freedoms are heavily restricted. A friend who was studying in Israel in the late 2010s was astounded by how homogenous the media landscape was, especially in terms of news. There are some organisations that do good work, but they themselves have documented how difficult it is to be a journalist in Israel who isn’t willing to be a propaganda mouthpiece. +972mag is one of the few publications in this space , and they do some absolutely incredible journalism, so check them out if you’d like to be able to get an insight into some of the on-the-ground politics in Israel. Their editorial team includes both Israelis and Palestinians, and much (if not all) of their work is available in both English and Hebrew — because even if there aren’t many in Israel inclined to listen, they want to get their work out to as many people as possible

I have to hope there’s a sizable demographic who sees all this as abhorrent as the rest of us.

Abandon that hope. There are Israelis who do think this is madness. There aren’t many of them and they are in no position to have any say whatsoever. There’s a significant contingent of Jews outside of Israel who are horrified, but they tend to be the ones weren’t interested in participating in the colonial project in the first place. You kind of have a distilled subset of those who are least likely to see other people as human.

Based on their voting habits, I don’t think we will see that any time soon.

There are many who recognise how insane and evil this is, but I’m afraid it seems like they are the minority of Israelis.

The candidate who will beat netenyahu in the next electioon think Netenyahu is too soft on Lebanon

I’m not an expert, so take all this with a grain of salt.

The problem with Israel and the region in general is that the normal-ish people are drowned out by the radicalised folks pointing to people like Ben Gvir on the other side and saying “if we try to normalise with them, this will happen. Do you want to negotiate with these monsters?” And repeat ad nauseum.

Ben Gvir himself is a Mizrahim (the Jews from the Middle Eastern diaspora instead of European), and while I can’t say about his family specifically, IIRC many Mizrahim tend to be more right-wing than the average populace because they’re the ones with more direct conflict and memory of being kicked out of their homes by Middle Eastern countries after the formation of Israel. To some, Israel was the only place they could go after they were kicked out because of being Jews. (You could argue that Israel’s actions led to the people being kicked out and the rise in antisemitism, but they could then argue the Holocaust was clear justification, or that it proved that Jews needed a state, or whatever. I’m not trying to state definitively who’s at fault or who’s in the right here.) It’s basically a siege mentality applied to an entire country after nearly a century of war for existence and due to a shared cultural memory of the Holocaust and other persecution that has convinced many of them that the only way to get “what they deserve” (whatever that may entail) is through beating their neighbours into submission — an attitude which has been part of Israeli politics since before Israel existed as a modern state with the Iron Wall essay by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

And obviously the same applies on the other side, which is why we have groups like Hamas, which grew from dissent over Arafat and the PLO’s more peaceful approach towards finding a resolution to the region during the First Intifada and Oslo. Meanwhile, on the Israeli side, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got shot by the Israeli far-right for trying to make a peace happen. So neither side can really work towards peace because the ones who try are shut down by volume and by force.

Yeah you definitely don’t know the internal politics of Israel.